But the point is, telling people to post when they have nothing to say will never work. If you stimulate them with stirring images, they WILL have something to say. Even if it is just laundry and shopping lists.

I could list all of the things I was able to cross off of my to-do list on the kitchen counter. Lots of yard work, laundry, baking bread, stuff like that. Fascinating reading, no? (No!)

I like the idea of living in a state you can travel away from easily. I have to drive for hundreds of miles in most directions to get out of Texas. Closest way out still takes several hours. I've been known to make that drive just so I can say I was out of Texas for a little while.

Hi MOM, I've been busy lately, clearing out spaces in my yard that have never before been touched by human hand - at least not since I've been living here. We took over a ton of metal to the metal recyclers, and we have enough scrap wood for a lifetime of fires. There is a huge pile of junk that will be going out shortly to be picked up by the council.

There are hundreds of bricks that I am going to use to make more no-dig gardens, and there is a lot more work to be done yet in the garden and barbeque area.

What is my reward for all this hard work you might ask? I'll tell you what. A COLD! The first cold I have had in over two years. Humphh! Who was it said no good deed goes unpunished? I yam pissed off!

California has the advantage, like some poeple I know, of being long but not too wide. So I can get to Arizona or Nevade in a couple of hours (or four) if Ineed to, although I can't see needing to very often. Yuma is a bustling little desert town, but the best thing that ever happened to me there was reaching the rest room at Denny's just off Exit 3.

Mountains? What mountains? Haven't seen mountains in a coon's age. The only mountains around here are submerged below the limestone left over from when the Gulf came up this high and various geologic shifts. They find metamorphic minerals in the middle of the state and up on the panhandle from some of those unseen mountains. Gotta head hundreds of miles west of here to see REAL mountains, and they aren't as real as the real mountains I grew up with, the Cascades and the Olympics. (Can't hardly imagine any more living in a house where I could see both ranges, off each side of the front porch, but I could, in two different houses I lived in.)

Bannock range to the west, Pocatello range to the east, and the Snake River Plain to the north. To the south is the Portneuf Gap, through which the Bonneville Flood came a few years back, creating the SR Plain, the Columbia River, etc., and leaving the Great Salt Lake as a remanant of its passing.

We set a record low for the date as the high temp yesterday: 51 F. Today the high is supposed to be about 65 F. The mountainsides are washed in the scarlet of the mountain maples and the brilliant yellow of the aspen.

Fall as done arrived.

(And I heard from my old friend Marlene! She and her husband have removed from Chicago to Durban, South Africa. She says it's a bit of a change....)

I heard from my cousin Gabe, the sculptor. He looks exactly like me, in the unpredictable toss of the gene cup, and is like an alter-ego parallel alternate universe identity -- he builds boats and sculptures and gets to do a lot of the things I would love to be doing if I weren't doing the things I am doing.

This could turn into a job with the Canadian government. I can see it know: Little Hawk, Minister of Mountainous Molehills. A budget of billions, a staff that numbers well into the tens, meetings year-round in every village and town in Canada, a private plane to whisk the Minister to and from those meetings, a coat similar to this one to ward off the Chill Of The North....

Yes, an experienced molehill-to-mountainer has a vibrant future ahead of him.

Yes, I feel that the great days are just ahead for me...I may soon get to meet Maureen McTeer and Mila Mulroney. I may get to trade jokes with Right Honourable Members on Parliament Hill. These are the salad days coming up, I can just feel it.

True, they certainly are chic. But few people know that they are made from moleskin condoms left over from that fad a few years ago. The gloves can be manufactured with less expense if the fingers are already made, you see.

Rapaire has effectively added the Ewwww! factor to gloves. I was thinking of little patches of moleskin on a sticky backing for feet. In shoes or boots. Works great. And that sticky stuff pulls the top of the blister right off when you stop walking around at the end of the day. . . (perhaps another ewwwww factor to consider. . . )

Pity on our suffering sister, Pulled the skin right off her blister! Now her agony's abetted, And her shoes are badly wetted, Now, with painful feet, her limp'll Hide with scowls her famous dimple. Let it heal, in just a while, So we again may see her smile. And let us send her, straight from Natchez, Several cases of them patches.

OR, if you do not make them up, you are reporting someone else's delusions as your own; a sort of psycho-plagiarism, appropriating unreality from others and then mis-owning it. Interesting case study could be made of it, I suppose. Reminds me of an old Punch joke:

"It's these damn butterflies, doctor!! They're all over me!!"

"Vell, don't brusch dem off on ME!!"

I wonder if that might be the secret of deeply persistant patterns of aberration? Obviously the right ownership of a viewpoint is part of the truth about it, so if you have deep-seated packages of thoughts and pictures you have misappropriated from others -- parents, the dogcatcher, babysitters, whatever--it would be really hard to get to a clear understanding of them.

Hey, MOM, they're resurfacing the street in front of my house. It's really noisy out there, and liable to be stinky, but at least I saw what they were up to before I pulled into my driveway. I parked up the block on a side street so I won't get my nice white truck all dirty with their road tar. (This way, if I ever get around to washing the dirt off, it won't leave behind conspicuous dark spots of oil.)

I will have to walk across the street, or maybe walk on the grass down to the bridge and then cross and walk up the other side so I don't get this stuff on my shoes also.

Trouble with the higher crown they're putting on the street, when we get heavy rains I'll get more water washing up on my front lawn and flower beds. (I am at a T intersection, and when the downhill flow from the stem of the T hits the cross bar, at my yard, the stem water pushes the crossbar water out of the street up onto the lawn.) I guess I'll have to go put in some kind of edging or build up a small berm at the curb. I've been thinking about doing that anyway, but this may be the road "improvement" that pushes me to do it.

Sir, I have ALWAYS told NOTHING but the Truth. Sometimes I have given the reader or listener more than their money's worth by tell a Truth-and-a-half or even a Double Truth. Once in a while I will even go whole hog and tell a great big Multiple Truth. But I have never, ever, told an Untruth, for to do so would place me among The Politicians.

Given the low index of veritas, I have to submit you falsify your own assertions in the instant!! :D

Keats was not a good speller and he actually can thank that for the preservation of his life. If his wife had ever found out how much he went into hock buying that "genuine antique picture of Attic dancing girls" from Mustapha Keiropolous, during Keats' "grand tour", she would have killed him. So she never learned how much he owed on a Grecian urn.

"If his wife had ever found out how much he went into hock buying that "genuine antique picture of Attic dancing girls" from Mustapha Keiropolous, during Keats' "grand tour", she would have killed him"

1. Keats never married 2. He saw the Urn at the British Museum- He never owned it. 2. He never had a "grand tour" - He went to Rome to try to cure his illness, and died there.